The turn to each other

With each passing day, we live ever more fully in the digital age. While in many ways this new cultural reality has already come, it has not yet fully been realized. This transition presents all of us with privileges and perils of magnitude similar to the transition from the pre-modern to the modern world. As with the previous cultural transformation, the journey into the digital age has implications—some of them profound—for theology.

Many have characterized the modern era as, the “turn to the subject.” Instead of focusing outward on metaphysical realities as foundation for knowledge, modernity looked to universal human subjectivity as the basis for certainty and legitimacy. In a predominant version of modernity, concern for how we know what we know supplanted a traditional focus on the nature of objective, external reality. This move led to a major reframing of the substance and methods of theology. For Kant and those who were influenced by him, God was shifted to the margins and functioned primarily as a necessary assumption underlying practical reason. Very little could be said about God that was not said first about human subjectivity. Theological reflection occurred by way of working outward from the structures of consciousness and conscience. In this predominant trajectory of modern theological thought, matters of theological substance were similarly reformulated and resituated by running them through human subjectivity. Protestant liberalism understood God to work immanently through human agency—whether within the inner life of the individual or through individuals acting in particular ways toward other individuals. Though Kierkegaard famously asserted the “infinite qualitative distance” between God and humanity as a corrective to some of the distortions arising from modern theological thought, his vision still tended to focus on the solitary human individual.

Such intellectual developments as Marxist thought, systems theory, and Object Relations theory have opened the way to rethinking everything in terms of social realities. Uri Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory of human development offers a dynamic way to hold together the individual, the social, and the cultural. New fields like interpersonal neurobiology and learning sciences that have come into being in recent years are reshaping the way we see the complex interactions of the personal and the social in the direction of structured webs of interaction. The internet and other forms of social media have further precipitated new ways of thinking about reality, human and otherwise. It may well be the case that the microchip has precipitated the “turn to each other” in practice as well as in theory. Democratic interconnectedness through digital media has already produced dramatic political change through the outbreak of revolutions and upheavals across northern Africa and the Middle East. The explosion of knowledge in the digital age means that no lone thinker can master whole fields of knowledge. The scope of knowledge in any one discipline or domain has become too vast for individual mastery. Moreover, it has become increasingly clear that domains of knowledge do not function within hermetically sealed spaces. They interconnect and overlap in multiple ways and levels. Increasingly, productive intellectual work has to be carried out collaboratively by teams.

The cultural ferment associated with the transition to the digital age will doubtless lead to shifts in both the methods and the substance of theology. For such massive cultural changes not to have a dramatic impact would signal that theology is either dead or an exercise in nostalgia. What might constructive engagement with the dynamism and challenges of the digital age entail?

The “turn to each other” in the digital age will likely bring about significant changes in methods for engaging in constructive theological work. Issues and problems in theology will increasingly be addressed collaboratively. Work by teams of theologians—often with various kinds of cultural and geographical diversity—will produce jointly authored contributions that will be made available across a range of platforms and media. Theological collaborators will also share the results of their work in hybrid symposia in which others participate both physically and virtually. Much of the results of such collaborative work will continue to be available digitally through online databases, wikis, and blogs. Open-source vehicles will mean that any given contribution to theological knowledge will have the possibility of a future life of extension, critique, and reframing in more immediate and broader ways than ever before. The provisionality of all theological constructs (Barth) will come to have more visibility in the digital age.

The ways in which the substance of theology is understood and articulated will also likely change in this new cultural epoch. The social approach to the doctrine of the Trinity articulated in recent decades seems to have anticipated theological developments in an age characterized by the “turn to each other.” Christology will certainly come to emphasize even more strongly than in the past that Jesus was a “man for others.” Soteriology will emphasize the corporate dimensions of the saving work of the Triune God in the events of the crucifixion and resurrection. New insights will emerge in relation to the encounter of Christianity with other religions, particularly as that encounter takes place at the level of social networks and family structure. The nature and purpose of the Church will inevitably undergo radical change in coming decades—lest the Church wither into obscurity and irrelevance. Church may well come to have more to do with the coincidence of time than of space. Instead of bureaucratic hierarchies, church structures will flatten and continually evolve. These are only a few of the ways that the substance of theology may change as we move more completely into the digital age.

Institutional supports for theology will certainly change in dramatic ways. Already, we see the struggles of the print publishing industry to stay afloat financially. Publishing lives now in a precarious zone between the paper past and the digital future. The single-authored manuscript may soon go the way of the Dodo and the eight-track tape deck. If I was a betting person, I would put money on the new norm of single- and multi-authored articles published in refereed online journals. As a result, tenure and promotion criteria in theological schools will need to change accordingly. Did I say theological schools? Even now, they are changing before our very eyes at a pace that dizzies the mind. Hybrid models of theological education—involving a mixture of physical and digital modes of presence—will surpass residential options as the norm within the next few years. Some have begun to wonder aloud whether schools will have any place at all in theological education. If theological schools manage to survive the transition into the digital age, the classic four-fold division of the curriculum into corresponding departments will likely give way to something more like interdisciplinary centers of theological inquiry oriented around major research questions or problems. Those theological schools that do survive will need to work under various models of collaborative partnership with theological schools situated in a variety of cultural contexts around the world. Students from around the world, from many theological institutions, and from no theological institution whatsoever, will likely enroll digitally in the courses of the future. Of necessity, pedagogies for the teaching of theology will have to shift away from the traditional teacher-oriented, content-tyranny, transmission of content model toward learning-centered, constructivist, and engaged pedagogies.

As is the case with any major cultural transition, challenges and risks appear in juxtaposition with discoveries and possibilities made possible by the new situation. In the age in which we increasingly live, risks of dumbing down theology through group-think and horizontal participation without any legitimate place for expert judgment definitely exist. Presentism or futurism also looms large as the digital age places a premium on always doing things in a “new and improved” manner. At the same time, the possibilities for constructive and reconstructive theological reflection in relation to global cultural contexts and social epistemologies stagger the imagination. The emergence of tremendous theological creativity and insight has just begun to come into view with the transition into the digital age. Whatever theology will look like in the digital age, it will certainly be described as the “turn to each other.”